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Reading Anne Enright

Anne Enright in London after winning the Man Booker prize. (Photo: The Associated Press)

Some American readers, and I am one of them, knew of Anne Enright, the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, through her essays long before they’d read her fiction.

Enright’s first-person pieces appeared frequently in the London Review of Books, and there was something about them – their clarity and strangeness and humor – that made you want to march straight to the bookstore to see where this woman’s fiction would take you.

Here is a slice of one of Enright’s LRB pieces, a recent essay about her obsession with the McCann missing child case. In it, Enright admits employing Google Earth to check out facts about the crime, and even recalls searching for interviews with the parents late at night on YouTube. She also writes:

I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an unhealthy trust of strangers. Maybe I should believe in myself more, and in the world less, because, despite the fact that I am one of the most dangerous people my children know, I keep them close by me. I don’t let them out of my sight. I shout in the supermarket, from aisle to aisle. I do this not just because some dark and nameless event will overtake them before the checkout, but also because they are not yet competent in the world. You see? I am the very opposite of the McCanns.

Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic. It keeps our children safe. Disliking the McCanns is an international sport. You might think the comments on the internet are filled with hatred, but hate pulls the object close; what I see instead is dislike – an uneasy, unsettled, relentlessly petty emotion. It is not that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass.

Here, from the same essay, is Enright on physical beauty:

Most of the animosity against the McCanns centres on the figure of Madeleine’s beautiful mother. I am otherwise inclined. I find Gerry McCann’s need to ‘influence the investigation’ more provoking than her flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that flecks her public appearances. I have never objected to good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue of narcissism in general; her daughter’s strong relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and pain.

And here is an excerpt from Enright’s October 2000 essay about becoming a mother:

It is pleasant when a part of your body makes sense, after many years. A man can fancy your backside, but you still get to sit on it. Breasts, on the other hand, were always just there. Even so, the anxiety of pregnancy is the anxiety of puberty all over again. I feel like I have done this before somehow, that I have passed that exam. I am 37. I don’t want my body to start ‘doing’ things, like some kind of axolotl. I do not believe people when they say these things will be wonderful, that they are ‘meant’. I am suspicious of the gleam in women’s eyes, that pack of believers, and listen instead to the voice of a friend who breastfed her children until they were fourteen and a half, and who now says, ‘They’re like ticks.’

So I feed the child because I should, and resign myself to staying home. I never liked being around nursing women – there was always too much love, too much need in the room. I also suspected it to be sexually gratifying. For whom? Oh for everyone: for the mother, the child, the father, the father-in-law. Everyone’s voice that little bit nervy, as though it weren’t happening: everyone taking pleasure in a perv-lite middle-class sort of way. Ick. ‘The only women who breastfeed are doctors’ wives and tinkers,’ a friend’s mother was told forty years ago, by the nurse who delivered her. I thought I sensed a similar distaste in the midwives, a couple of months ago, who were obliged by hospital and Government policy to prod the child and pinch my nipple, though perhaps – let’s face it sisters – not quite that hard. It is probably easier for men, who like breasts in general, but I have always found them mildly disgusting, at least up close. They also often make me jealous. Even the word ‘breast’ is difficult. Funny how many people say they find public breastfeeding a bit ‘in your face’. Oh, the rage.

The good news about Enright’s fiction, especially her Man Booker-winning novel “The Gathering,” is that it’s better even then you’d hoped it would be.

what a strangely disconnectedness ….to think of the act of breast-feeding her baby as a peep-show opportunity for perverts.
Uh, I hope these thoughts aren’t transmitted into her milk supply.

Regarding her “obsession” with the McCanns, it’s true that “we” hate them/love them/condemn them/forgive them/fear what’s happened to them/blame them because we suspect their daughter came to harm because of them.

“We all” know that to be a parent is to become both the most valuable player and the most dreaded error component in a child’s life.

I will not be buying Anne Enright’s books at any price. Her cruel remarks about the McCann’s were unnecessarily vicious. It would appear she has never met this unhappy couple. What right had she to say anything about them at all?

What a load of hurtful self righteous rubbish from this dreadful woman who clearly has never made a stupid mistake. She will fade back into being a nobody again sdoon anyway, her novel is dreary and boring and few people bought it apart from me. If i had 15 minutes of fame i would try to say something kind or shut up.

I was proud to see an Irish woman winning the booker prize (being Irish myself). That pride was soon shattered when she expressed her views on the McCanns. Yes she is certainly entitled to dislike them if she wishes but the way I see it she’s using her 5 minutes of fame to make it last that bit longer. Anne, easy for you to sit there with a smile on your face having won your award – you are not going through the everyday nightmare that the McCanns are living and in my opinion are coping with with such dignity that can only be admired. Shame on you.

My god, you commentators are idiots! “Queer women do not exist”? “Say something kind or shut up”? “Shame on you”? I have been moved to comment myself — though I have never before — by the sheer obtuse, close-minded, PC and anti-intellectual tenor of these comments. Enright isn’t judging anyone, she’s investigating her own complex reactions. Is that to be condemned? Say something intelligent or shut up.

In total agreeement with sangmo. I have no pity for the McCanns. How could such supposedly intelligent people leave their children unattended while they wined and dined. They don’t deserve pity. Enright has every right to question the McCanns’ motives.

Well clearly anyone opposing Enright is “anti intellectual”, that closes the argument then! I am a university lecturer but apparently not clever enough to understand the issues.
Maybe if she had been around as long as more established writers we could take the comments in a wider context but as it is she should express her “complex reactions” in a place they can’t make a sad situation worse.

Breastfeeding is Ick? Perv-lite? Sexually gratifying? What is Enright talking about? There don’t have to be all these strange emotional valences over a perfectly natural function. News flash – we are evolved to feed our children this way. What’s up with all the hyperventilating?

A strange woman, Enright. As for the McCanns, it’s simple. We don’t know what happened to Madeleine – other than it was obviously something dreadful. I think most parents would not have left their children alone (we’ve been in similar situations, and we always had baby-sitters – it’s odd that they didn’t, and it showed poor judgment.) But poor judgment is not murder. Either they’re innocent (in which case they’ve been fearfully abused by the press and the endless public speculation and commentary) or they’re not, in which case they are unspeakably dreadful people. We don’t know, one way or another, and watching the McCanns is like reading tea leaves. I don’t care about Kate McCann’s clothes and her earrings and whether she cries or not. It’s appalling to discuss her husband’s language, or his stiffness, or whether (for Heaven’s sake) he’s Madeleine’s biological father.

Let’s just drop all this idle yak until the truth comes out – if it ever does.

I feel it is pretty disgusting that Ann Enright can be so insensitive to the Mccann’s situation. What is wrong with “holding hands” on their way to mass? What is wrong with wearing ribbons? They are genuinely suffering over their daughter’s abduction. How arrogant was my first reaction when I read her piece in the Review.

This discussion is more interesting than Enright, her book, her comments, and certainly more entertaining than many Booker winners.

Given 24 months noen of this will be remembered and Enright will return to relative quiet, thank goodness. She seems to have little restraint, blurting out the silliest and slimly founded thoughts without much discretion. Seems there is a definition of adulthood that applies here, something that the Ms. Enright might lack?

As the first book read by our newly formed book club, I was somewhat dissapointed with the book. It is hard to keep her story straight in your mind, is she really reliving the past, or making it up. To tell the truth, I could not tell the difference.
We have not discussed the book yet, I can’t wait to see the other ladies’ opinion

The Gathering contains some of the most beautiful and original prose I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s a dark book about damaged people, and an honest examination of a journey to comprehend the forces at work in the protaganist’s situation. A pity that some posters on here are a little too preoccupied with maintaining their own shaky ‘right-on’ facades in the face of expressions of (sometimes brutal) honesty. Get your heads out of the sand, people! Enright’s not a genocidal psychopath – she’s a woman, a mother in the 21st century. Not reading The Gathering because she doesn’t like the McCann’s or breastfeeding is frankly laughable.